12 days of Christmas: Day 10 – Promotion and Engagement

When it comes to blogging, I would say that you spend equally the same amount of time promoting yourself as you do creating the content you promote. I’ll fess up straight away, I’m not on top of my promotion as much as I should be but I know what needs to be done. Let’s start off with my routine: My content becomes live, I copy the link and share it with all of the roughly 15 beauty blogger groups I’m a part of on Facebook, this link will then get shared on my Instagram and Twitter. Occasionally depending on what the post is about I will also promote it on the brands social media page and drop them an email letting them know that this post is available.

Most to least successful routes of promotion I have observed are:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

In that order. I believe the reason why Instagram lags behind is because you can’t put direct links in the comments of an image, so the viewer has to see your picture, click on your username and then click on the link in your bio. Facebook and Twitter on the other hand are very easy, one click and you are there. A lot of my views also come from search engines which is why it is so important that your title and content is relevant to the subject you are blogging about.

Facebook groups are a great way of connecting with likeminded people. One of the best groups are Beauty Bloggers Corner, they have a lovely community spirit about them and really engage with one another. Most recently, they created a list of blogs and got all the members to submit their blog handles so that they could be a part of the list. Along with the recommendation, I would always suggest doing your own research for appropriate groups because some of them are country specific only or have requirements. There are a lot of inactive groups out their unfortunately but over time you will learn which ones are useful and which are not.

Twitter on the other hand is far easier to promote yourself from. Just use some relevant hashtags (#blog, #bloggers, #crueltyfree) and they generate a lot of interest. Sooner or later you will then get added to relevant lists which is almost like a fishing net that focuses only on the members involved of the net. I’m a part of about 6 lists and these are a great way to draw in more of an audience for your posts.

Word of mouth thankfully I know a lot women and at least once in my time of knowing them have the complained about a sudden outbreak of spots, damaged hair or they simply want to try out a new lipstick. I shamelessly plug my own posts, it’s a great way to get personal interaction and hopefully the word of mouth will spread.

There are other avenues of online promotion that I have been looking in to recently, one of which was Reddit. I read a blog that swore they garnered a lot more interest from Reddit. It’s definitely something I want to try out because I have nothing to lose and I will report back.

Stay tuned for my penultimate post tomorrow where I will be posting about being PR friendly and approaching brands.

How do you promote your blog and what do you find the most successful? Let me know in the comments below ⬇